Showing July 5 – August 31, 2017
Recption: Saturday July 15, 5 – 7 pm
Artist Talk: Saturday August 12, 5 – 7pm
Sarah Ammons, Canadian artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area was interviewed by Venison Magazine in Autumn 2016. Since our interview Sarah has continued to make compelling works of art and exhibit through out California and Canada! Come join us on July 15th and meet the artist yourself!
Artist Statement:
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe, as Arsippe tells it in book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, is a story of burning desire, untimely destruction, and a thin split in a brick wall. The fascination for me, the point of departure for my work, is this fissure that exists between the two halves of a relationship. In my contemporary eye, the thin split is the place where a particular language and reality exists for a couple. It is a point or a moment where we arrive at an understanding of ourselves and who we are in relation to another person. Love is a kind of grounding, a savior of sanity – a unifying force and a creation of a whole world which exists between two conscious minds. However, on either side of the wall that separates Pyramus and Thisbe, there exist forces that are at war with one another and seek to keep them apart. Herein lies the conflict two people in a relationship face over time. There is struggle of identity between the person that you are as you exist in unity with the one you love, and all the other versions of yourself that you have been and continue to evolve into. This ties in with the Lacanian notion of the Gap, which marks the place where one finds a truth about oneself that does not fit in with the identity that has been established.
My interest lies in the bringing together and pulling apart – the creation and destruction of various identities – that takes place in romance. There is contradiction between the unity romantic love and the solitary psychological existence of the individuals involved. Looking at historical sources from the West, like Catullus, Ovid and the Neoteric poets among more current psychological influences like Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein, I intend to weave my findings into a contemporary investigation and depiction of the human struggle to love, be loved and maintain a sense of self.
My large scale drawings on panel use the traditional technique silverpoint. The expressive use of line and the sense of building up of marks to create representational images has an existential connotation, not unlike how we form our identities from early experience coupled with the information gathered throughout our lives. Steeped in psychological reality, I want to create work that will resonate emotionally and physically with the viewer as they investigate and meditate in my hand made process. Drawing upon tinted panels allows me to dramatize certain areas of importance with paint, leaving an impression of selective memory. With these technical aspects in mind along with the relational content of my images I intend to leave the viewer questioning as they try to read the undercurrents of emotion.
